dscott8 wrote:Sorry, but I can't see how the lack of evidence is evidence.

That's because you're not a conspiracy theorist. To the average CT, a lack of evidence about [insert insane imaginings here] is proof that it must exist because there is no direct evidence proving that [insert insane imaginings here... again] does not exist.This is why some people still believe that Adolf Hitler is alive in Argentina (even though his skull was found by Russian soldiers and identified... although Stalin ordered it to be kept quiet to give him an excuse for his foreign interventions), that the Moon Landings were faked, that Atlantis flew off into the stars after hiding under the ocean and that Jews were behind the September 11 attacks. They have refused to accept evidence disproving their theories, therefore their theories must be correct.

At the risk of stepping on my sword, I'm going to wade a little way in to this swamp.

First off, Imaginos, I am going to ask if you are a Classical scholar? If so, would you mind posting your bibliography, since you clearly have access to material none of my other sources have seen, or at least haven't correctly understood? If not, what secondary sources are you consulting to make the statements quoted below? Or are you simply going to the Book of What Everybody Knows? I ask because I'm not a scholar of the Classical period, but have recently been studying it rather extensively, in particular its technology, the transition to the medieval period and the classical world's connections with the contemporary Middle East. And, frankly, I don't recognise any of what you say in the studies I've been reading.

Your statement on Roman records, for example, is more reminiscent of Mussolini's Rome than that of Crassus or Augustus. The ancient Romans didn't establish vast archives of judicial, fiscal and vital statistics records gathered from across the Empire, preserved to the present day in some catacomb on the Palatine Hill. All the center really cared about was that taxes owing arrive on schedule. Very occasional individual records survive from appeals to the emperor over abuses or corruption in the system. On Spartacus, I'm only able to find 3 ancient sources, which seem to be quoting one or two older writers [one of them Livy, and his text didn't survive]: Appian of Alexandria, Plutarch of Chaeronaea and Publius Annius Florus. None of them provide information on when or where he was born, and don't even seem to be sure how or why he was enslaved. More generally, bureaucratic records from the period rarely survive, and almost all of what does remain from that 'pervasive' bureaucracy is tax records that were reused for wrappings and buried in sand in Egypt. We actually know more about the Achaemenid administration, because their records were mostly on clay, which can actually come out _more_ intact when the palace is looted and burned than the papyrus and parchment the Romans used. The only direct records of a governorship that I've encountered are Pliny the Younger's correspondance with Trajan, from his period in Bythinia, and they survive because Pliny published them in his Epistulae. [and that survives because it became a model for writing Latin correspondence used right up to the 18th century]. TTBOMK there are _no_ such surviving records from the 1st or 2nd [or third, for that matter] centuries from Palestine. Or Gaul. Or Britannia. Hell, historians managed to lose track of an entire bloody Roman Legion, giving rise to the legend of Legio IX Hispania marching north from Eboracum into the mists of Caledonia and vanishing in some unrecorded last stand [in fact, archaeology tells us that it marched - and sailed - south to the Limes in Germany where it remained until the collapse of the frontier in the 5th century]

Now, as to the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth: I'm not going to argue for the historical _or_ theological exactitude of the New Testament. Both are suspect in my eyes, and I would explicitly deny the inerrancy attributed to it. OTOH, it's no surprise that there's no record of his birth or life, when there are no records of ~98% of the residents of the Empire - we aren't even certain of the date or place of birth of a great many of the men who later became emperor. Given the apparent complete loss of records from the area, it's no great surprise that there's no judicial record of his death any more than there is for the other victim(s) of crucifixion whose remains have be discovered [and the fact that there have been such remains recovered at all gives you an idea of just how turbulent the area was - this was a punishment for rebellion, and not common]. It is interesting that Josephus' mention is sufficiently slight to be highly debatable - at the very least, later Christian copyists felt that it needed to be juiced up a bit. The balance of the evidence suggests that it's not outright forgery, however, and the slightness of the reference would reflect the weight accorded the incident by both Jews and Romans; it's likely that it was never even reported to Tiberius. It is not debatable that by the time of Nero - thirty years later, or within living memory of the events recounted in the Gospels - Christians in Rome were sufficiently numerous, and sufficiently suspect, to be useful scapegoats. A generation later, anonymous denunciations for Christianity [an offense bordering on sedition at the time] were a useful tool in the political, social and economic conflicts of Asia. Enough so that Pliny the Younger found them annoying enought it was worth his while to write to the Emperor asking for guidance on what to do about them. The satirists would have had a field day if Emperors and Imperial Governors were getting worked up over the doctrine of a man who never existed, and they're among the best-presevered authors of the period, although a couple of them did well to avoid crucifixion themselves.

Imaginos1892 wrote:Everybody knows about Spartacus. There are Roman records of where and when Spartacus was born, where and when he died, a lot of details about his life, and a whole shitload of details about the slave rebellion he wound up leading.

According to The Bible, Jesus caused almost as much trouble as Spartacus about a hundred years later — and yet the compulsively record-keeping Romans did not see fit to write ONE SINGLE WORD about any of those very public incidents, or the person responsible. I find it harder to believe that those events actually took place and NO records were ever made of them, than the multiple uncorroborated accounts of magic and miracles.

Exidor wrote:Yup. Nothing I haven't had thrown at me before.

Imaginos1892 wrote:Okay, then, what's your answer? How do you explain the fact that the enormous and pervasive Roman bureaucracy just kind of…missed the very existence of your rabble-rousing spiritual leader? Why is there no record of the imprisonment and trial detailed in The Bible? The public procession through the middle of town? The execution, and interment? No record of any of the incidents that led to Jesus being tried, convicted and executed?

NOT!

ONE!

WORD!!

— about a series of crimes against the authorities that resulted in the death penalty. We know exactly where the birth record should be, but that doesn't exist either. So, I don't find any of those stories in any way credible.

There is a term for a fantastic story presented without any corroborating evidence: A TALL TALE. Until some evidence is presented, that's all those stories are.———————————Josephine: "So, is this a tall tale?"Edward: "It's not a short one."

Louis R wrote:None of them provide information on when or where he was born, and don't even seem to be sure how or why he was enslaved.

The fact that Spartacus existed, and was one of the leaders of a major slave rebellion, is not in doubt. He was born in Thrace between 111 and 110 BC, escaped from Capua with a group of slaves in 73 BC, battled several Roman forces sent against them, and they were finally defeated by General Crassus in late 71 BC.

According to a certain collection of stories, in 31 AD Jesus supposedly interfered with tax collectors in some of the Roman temples; they would certainly have taken notice of that. He gathered thousands of followers. They claim he caused enough trouble to get the provincial governor’s attention, be publicly tried and sentenced to death. How could all of those things have happened, and nobody ever wrote any of it down, or even remembered? None of those thousands of followers ever told their relatives?

Because if any such records had ever been found, the fundies would see to it that EVERYBODY heard about them.

You are quoting a date that I can find in no contemporary account that I have so far turned up - and I'm using 'contemporary' extremely loosely, since there doesn't seem to be anything surviving from less than ~150 years later [the date in Wikipedia, BTW, is unsourced, so doesn't count]. Or, if you're paying attention, roughly the same interval as the accounts of Christ you want to condemn for having no contemporary support.

Basically, you don't seem to grasp just how meaningless your argument about lack of contemporary material is. There are two reasons for that: there isn't a lot of it, because only one person in several hundred was ever recorded on anything but a tombstone and survival even for the works of the great writers was pretty much random, and a large part of what is available is approximately as reliable as 1940s reports in Pravda on the Gulag and collective farming. Even those who raised armed rebellion only survive in Roman accounts of the war [if it was sufficiently spectacular] or of the lives of the generals who suppressed them - _if_ said accounts survive - and Jesus of Nazareth did _not_ raise armed rebellion, meaning that he was of little significance to any Roman. Spartacus _did_. In fact, he was supposedly significant enough he scared the togas off the Roman Senate, and nonetheless one of the prime accounts of him is the mention in Plutarch's life of Crassus. Written c.100AD. AFAICT there are no surviving earlier accounts - maybe the whole episode was made up to make Crassus look as if he had been at least marginally competent? The Romans are known to have done that sort of thing - witness the hoorah they created when the Parthians gave them back Crassus' standards.

TL;DR: it is _normal_ for the rare individuals whose names survive from Classical Antiquity to be known from a single report, which as often as not survives only as fragments quoted by much later writers - or not at all, being known because somebody refers to it as a source of information.

Imaginos1892 wrote:

Louis R wrote:None of them provide information on when or where he was born, and don't even seem to be sure how or why he was enslaved.

The fact that Spartacus existed, and was one of the leaders of a major slave rebellion, is not in doubt. He was born in Thrace between 111 and 110 BC, escaped from Capua with a group of slaves in 73 BC, battled several Roman forces sent against them, and they were finally defeated by General Crassus in late 71 BC.

According to a certain collection of stories, in 31 AD Jesus supposedly interfered with tax collectors in some of the Roman temples; they would certainly have taken notice of that. He gathered thousands of followers. They claim he caused enough trouble to get the provincial governor’s attention, be publicly tried and sentenced to death. How could all of those things have happened, and nobody ever wrote any of it down, or even remembered? None of those thousands of followers ever told their relatives?

Because if any such records had ever been found, the fundies would see to it that EVERYBODY heard about them.